The Ashes
by Aurora-Borealis Coyote
Summary: When she dreams, she's awake, and nothing is blue or mechanical or gentle. It's just her flying away on the smoke. Alternate events and character interpretation, firebender!Asami


**This is based off of a theory I've seen, that Asami is actually a firebender, and when the firebenders were coming after her family she tried to fend them off but she accidentally created some fire that burned her mother. It always interested me as an idea….this just came out. **

In her dreams she can feel smoke licking her face like an insatiable pet growing larger and larger and more feral every day.

_Good girl, _it hisses, broiling and deformed and grotesquely soft, so soft she can float away on it and she doesn't want to float away because she knows what comes after, she won't let anyone else fly, they all belong here on the ground. The machines her father makes can fly but only because he can pilot them safely and they hover stiff and sturdy in the sky like homes, just like homes, but in the wrong place.

_Good girl, I love you too, _it roars the way _she _used to, - she can't say her name, you see, she _can't- _and she screams at it to leave and never come back, leave like the men did, the men who were going to- they were going to-

_You finished the job for them, _its wise voice muses horrifically, this isn't even a dream, really. It isn't real but she's so awake. So very awake and aware and sensing. She always is, when it comes, or when she listens to it.

_When I summon it._

_And I hate you for it, _she thinks, so forcefully some part of her has to be able to take it in, _I hate you more than I can ever hate anything,_ _she didn't deserve it and I let her- I sent her along- _

And in the pink morning she wakes up and paints a flaming red smile, _pretty little doll,_ paints it over her lips and brushes her mass of billowing black hair until it _waves, _and she rides the air and _flies_, at least, with technology, because machines do whatever you tell them to do and nothing more and nothing less, really, it took long enough for them to be invented.

_And when the sun sets and the fires hide you come out and rule the city, princess,_ its warmth is sinister but she is compressed- mistake mistake mistake, she misspoke, she's composed, she's the city's darling celebrity, no trouble from her, she's just so sweet and gentle and _spirited - _ the newspapers have pictures of her and her father today, and in the black-and-white print they are faded, they're _charred- you're as beautiful as your mother, _a friend of her father's told her tonight at the party, she's still thinking about it, it wasn't just a disposable gala that everyone goes to for showing off jewels and cars, the _Avatar_ was there- _of course you're beautiful, you're the phoenix in the ashes, _it goads her and when she speaks with Korra, that's what she prefers to be called, she knows what she can do.

But she's the Avatar and it's her job so it's okay, it's okay, just as long as it's just her- it works well with her anyway, she's friendly and clever and quick, like sparks and glimmering lights, not like thick clotting bloodred choking waves surrounding everything it flies by. Korra is blue like the ocean, like the city, like life's evenness, and she wears red like style and glamour and modernity and what life will always, always bring without any exceptions whatsoever even if you ask nicely, even if you fight it with itself.

That night Korra and Mako and Bolin (they're all so nice and having friends is something she had forgotten she wanted, something she forgot she could do, but when you can do so many other things it's easy to be preoccupied. They feel so safe to be around because they don't know how to kill it. She can tell.) leave her sights and she goes back to her spacious room. She doesn't mind being alone, it teaches you how to live, how to depend on yourself. She can't expect her father to raise a helpless child, after all.

She looks out the window, at the glimmering gold lights of lanterns and electricity and the silver moon and the glow on the water and the rich darkness of the earth. The world is balanced and beautiful and kind, the elements are her friends just like her new ones, they are a part of her world around her.

She locks her door, clicking softly- _you don't want to be heard, but if you do, you know what to do- _and the key to one of the satomobiles lies on her pristine desk . Just in case. They're good for so many purposes.

When she screams that night she keeps her eyes and mouth closed, red makeup she forgot she had on staining the bedsheets she presses her face against, they're so soft and warm and smooth. Please just keep shut, she eases herself; using her own voice, making it be her own voice. You don't want the red to come out, not now. It thrives off emotion and your feelings don't belong to it anymore. You're what's left, more than bones, and that shouldn't have happened and it won't again.

_Asami, you're such a levelheaded girl, and so grown up for your age, _one of the coworkers told her once, or the businessmen. They all look t he same after a while, but she likes them anyway. They can be a bit monotonous but in a nice way. Sometimes same and different don't matter when you can remember clearly after all, when she was done, the bad men, the criminals, the ones she was only trying to scare off a little, create a diversion so she could escape, they looked like gray ice and bones-

_Just like that and my mother was gone. A firebender killed her. Murdered her. _

_(_oh spirits please kill it just kill it maybe it will go to someone else's body and they can use it I have so many other things I can do just kill it just go away)

In her head it's real, she's opening her mouth and the ashes _float _out .


End file.
